The Supreme Court Ruling on Workplace Harassment That Got Buried

July 17, 2013 Black Truth News Community News, Politics, Recent Posts

Justice Clarence Thomas, who was himself once accused of perpetrating sexual harassment, went even further in his solo concurrent opinion, saying that previous cases establishing sexual harassment standards were wrongly decided.

To the average worker today, though, the Court’s restriction on defining a “supervisor” in this way doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Most supervisors have to appeal to higher-level executives or human resources departments to enact demotions or alter pay. And, worryingly, though Vance v. Ball State was about racial harassment, there’s no reason it wouldn’t apply to other kinds of protections provided for in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, including sexual harassment and harassment due to religion. This is a ruling likely to disproportionately affect women, since, according to data collected by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, just 16.3 percent of the more than 11,000 sexual harassment charges filed in fiscal year 2011 were from men.

“It makes a lot of sense for a large company to limit the number of people who actually have authority to take actions like firing and hiring and demoting,” said Fatima Goss Graves, Vice President for Education and Employment at the National Women’s Law Center. But she pointed out that many companies create a structure where supervisors have a lot of leeway over a worker’s environment, even if he or she doesn’t have the power to hire and fire.